[The uncertain future of general surgery. A specialty in the process of extinction]

General surgery was the first specialty of medicine. Nowadays, it is fragmented a progressive number of specialties, and has lost many of its fields. What will be the future of general surgery? What will be its repercussion on teaching surgery? From the point of view of a professor of surgery, our specialty today has nothing like what it was in the middle of the past century. Every day, its field of action becomes more and more reduced. Probably in the future, training in surgery will be limited to 2 years of basic knowledge, before the resident goes into the specialty of his/her choice.